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Dec. 6, 2025 - Epoch Times
41:44
Here’s the Real Problem for America’s Middle Class | Robert Kiyosaki
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Time Text
When I was 10 years old, my poor dad kept out, hey, dad, dad, dad.
What am I going to learn about money?
He says, we don't teach school about money.
In this episode, we sat down with Robert Kiyosaki.
His book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, has sold 43 million copies and remains the top title in personal finance.
I said, well, how did I get rich?
He says, well, you stay in school, get your PhD.
Get your PhD.
I said, Dad, you have a PhD.
We're poor.
He says, well, then you better talk to your best friend's father.
That was Rich Dad.
From reading the Communist Manifesto to becoming an advocate for capitalist financial education, Kiyosaki warns about the danger of hyperinflation and central bank control.
Every time you print money, the gap between rich and poor is getting wider and wider and wider.
What Marx wanted was this gap between rich and poor.
He also shares three lessons to build wealth that he believes can change your life and help you become truly self-sufficient.
Your poor dad, Marxist, good man.
He says we should give people money.
Well, that's honorable.
But why not teach them?
Why not teach people the fish versus how to steal fish?
Let's say you're a young person today and you don't have a lot of money.
What's your next step?
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellek.
Robert Kiyosaki, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
It's my honor, my honor.
I mean, I love what the Epoch Times is doing.
I'm so honored to be part of your program.
So if go back and real quickly, when I was 18 years old, I read this book here, The Communist Manifesto.
And I was living in Hawaii, and I went to school in New York.
I went to military school.
And my economics teacher says, you have to read this book.
And I went, why?
He says, because you must know your enemy.
And my economics teacher was a, I went to Kings Point.
He went to West Point, Academy graduates.
And he says, and he flew the B-17 in World War II, got shot down, captured, all this stuff.
He says, these guys are not stopping.
And I went, holy mackerel.
And then, so I wrote this book here, The Capitalist Manifesto, against this here.
Because our school system, as you know, Marx was an academic type, pointy-hit guy.
And our school systems are teaching Marxism.
And this here is my, I just happened to find this.
This is my hat from Vietnam.
I was a Marine Corps first lieutenant.
That was my gunship drivers.
Our call sign was Scarface.
And I was at the battle in 1972, 71.
I was at the Battle of Quang Tree when the North Vietnamese busted through.
And I was going, so we're gunship pilots going in.
We couldn't stop them.
And the communists were coming through.
I was going, oh my God, what's happening here?
We lost so many men that day.
The worst thing was the North Vietnamese were running.
They carried the AK-47 and they run like this.
I was a U.S. Marine and they were defending them.
And the South Vietnamese turned and ran.
Jan, When I saw the South Vietnamese turn and run, one of the saddest days of my life.
And ever since then, I've been fighting communism by teaching capitals.
Well, you could imagine I was surprised when you came in the door with the Communist Manifesto.
It's worth reading.
You know, the average American has no idea.
And that's the problem.
I have the good fortune or bad fortune to be in the right place at the wrong time.
Like the Battle of Kwang Tree, you know, when the North Vietnamese broke through.
Well, and thank you for your service, by the way.
Thank you.
It's worth fighting.
Our freedom is worth fighting for.
So when they broke through, I went, what am I seeing here?
When I was 18 or 19 years old, I held up a coin, 1965.
A silver dollar was no longer silver.
It was copper.
And what they were doing, the U.S. government, they were violating Gresham's law.
And what Gresham's law says, when bad money enters a system, good money goes into hiding.
And I went, what the heck's going on here?
So in 1965, as an 18-year-old kid, I go to school at a military school.
I read this book.
And I see our currency, our dollars going down.
We used to be a silver certificate.
Now we're a Federal Reserve note.
And as most people know, there's a big movement on to end the Fed, the Federal Reserve Bank, because it's not federal.
It's not reserve.
It's not a bank.
It's a Marxist organization.
It's a central bank.
And in 1912 or 1913, when the Fed came to America, it was the end of America.
And our freedom is being stolen via our money.
You said you had to run from, was it you or your parents ran from Poland?
My parents actually left Poland in 70.
Yeah, 1970.
People haven't seen communism.
And the problem is our school system, the communists, our academics, I mean, our professors, we got attacked by 39 professors at Arizona State University.
I think the fourth or fifth largest university in America.
I was teaching capitalism.
And they said, stop.
So I respect the EPOC Times for your fight against communism, Marxism, because I'm still in the fight.
I just fight as an author, though.
And I have a board game and all this.
I teach capitalism.
But our schools are taught by Marxists.
Did you know that only 26% of young people trust the media these days?
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Journalism was just that, journalism.
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What's right or wrong, that's for the reader to decide.
That's for you to decide.
But now journalism has almost become a kind of a team sport.
They pick a side and they stick to it.
And that's just how they do their business.
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Before we jump into Dealing with our fraught economy, how to actually build wealth as a young person today, all these types of questions.
You also told me that you were actually in Zimbabwe.
Tell me about that.
Yeah, Zimbabwe, because I was a student of money, I'm a politically incorrect hunter.
So I was out in Zimbabwe, I think in 2000, 2002, and I was there for the collapse of Zimbabwe because they printed too much money.
Remember, they had like $25 trillion bill, couldn't buy you an egg.
They kept printing money.
I went, holy miracle.
And Zimbabwe collapsed.
America is doing the same thing.
We're now $38 trillion in debt and climbing because of the Federal Reserve Bank, which is Marxist.
So I'm in Zimbabwe watching this collapse.
I thought I was back in Vietnam again.
I was already back from Vietnam.
I'm in a truck.
I'm a hunter.
And when the economy collapsed in Zimbabwe, they called them war vets.
These young black guys come up with AK-47s.
I went.
And I put the gun right here.
They took everything.
They took the farm.
They took it all.
They called it reparations.
So I just went back this year, 2025, to teach my cash flow game.
And the Zimbabwe Economic Council asked me to teach money to Zimbabwe through the cash flow game, you know.
And it was such an honor to go back there.
So like it was, I'm writing a new book called I Kept My Promise.
I said, I'll return, I'll come back, and I'll teach.
But I've seen too much.
Zimbabwe was such a wake-up call.
Kwang Tri was such a wake-up call.
18, going to military school, reading this book, and then holding up a coin at 18, going, why is our money?
Why is our silver coins?
Why are they copper now?
And they were stealing our wealth via our money.
And that's what happens when central banks take over.
Well, I think we're not quite there yet.
Not this sort of hyperinflation.
I remember seeing that.
It was just something, it was kind of unimaginable, the level at which it was growing.
Even as it, you know, when a lot younger, I saw that as being hugely problematic.
But, you know, how do we deal with $38 trillion in debt?
Can't.
So that's why, you know, one of the questions we're talking about before this program started, that's why I own gold mines and I own silver coins because they can't print gold and they can't print silver.
And I own a lot of Bitcoin, Ethereum.
I want to get away from my government as much as I can.
I hate to say this, but the U.S. government's corrupt.
And, you know, my friend here is Donald Trump.
And we've written two books together.
And then he became president.
We're supposed to write the third book.
He goes, hey, Robert, I can't write the third book.
I'm going to run for president.
I said, good luck.
Just amazing that he keeps going.
But we got together to teach money, teach financial education.
But our school systems stop us.
So it's in academics.
Exactly, you know, what Marx believed was the intellectuals should run the world.
People like my poor dad, PhDs.
They think they're superior to all of us.
Just because they went to school and got a PhD, they think they're smarter than you and me.
You know, as we were preparing for this interview, one of my producers mentioned to me that she first heard about you when her father told her, I'm the poor dad, actually, and you should learn how to, you know, you should learn the rich dad principles.
But things have changed since you wrote that book.
Gotten worse.
Yeah.
So, so, so, where are we at today?
What is the situation for young people or for their parents or grandparents who want to, you know, help them basically be successful today?
Well, the question I start with is: what did school teach about money?
Why not?
It's because our school system's Marxist.
They're like my poor dad.
They're good people.
They just don't know.
And their whole value system is: you know, I'm a straight A student.
I got my PhD, or I'm a doctor, I'm an accountant, I'm an attorney.
I'm smart, but they don't know anything about money.
And one of the things that this guy talked about here was income tax.
He said, Marx said, taxes.
Taxes are essential for the spread of communism.
Now, think about this.
America was founded as a tax-free nation in 1773 with a thing called the Boston Tea Party.
America was founded as a tax revolt against Mother England.
And so in 1913, I think my old man now, when the Fed came in, the next thing was formed was the 16th Amendment, which allowed taxes to come back into America.
So what's happening is you can see it, the gap between rich and poor is getting wider and wider and wider.
And every time you print money, fake money, you know, fiat money, I get richer, rich get richer, poor middle class get poor because inflation sends my price.
I have oil wells because you can't print oil.
So I have oil wells, the price of oil goes up.
The price of chickens goes up, food goes up, real estate goes up.
But when mom and pop, you know, Mr. Mrs. middle class go to the supermarket, they go, what happened?
I can't afford to eat anymore.
So I think what Marx wanted was this gap between rich and poor.
In fact, that was his plan.
As if you studied Marx, he says he wanted equality.
He says, the way you destroy anybody is you pull the poor up, but you pull the rich down.
And that's what Marx was trying to do.
And so I see all that going on right now.
And today, I've never seen such homelessness spreading all across the world, but also America.
I've seen homelessness in Africa and things like this.
But we're in Phoenix, Arizona right now.
We have whole zones full of homeless people because they can't afford real estate.
Their dollar doesn't pay it much.
So that's why I started when I saw in Vietnam, when the North Vietnamese punched through the line, again, this is my squadron here, and very proud to be U.S. Marine and gunship pilot, and they kept coming.
And then they were running like this with their AKs this way.
And a few years later, I'm in Zimbabwe, the same thing, going, it's repeating.
It's just repeating.
And just to clarify, with the, you know, Marx's intention, the way I understand it, what you said was very interesting, right?
What I understand it is he was trying, he wanted to increase that division, right, between the rich and the poor so there would be struggle.
Did I get that right?
He wanted to bring the poor up and the rich down.
You know, his thing was the take away the means of, he wanted to control the means of production.
That's what he wanted.
And he says the abolition of private property is what Marx wanted.
And this guy, what is his name?
I forget his name.
Someday you'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
But the situation that you described is one where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
So they're separating from each other, not coming together.
Can you clarify that?
Well, when you print money, I get richer because I own real estate.
I own oil wells.
I own cattle.
You know, food gets up in price.
But the poor and middle class have to pay for it.
So my apartment houses go up, but the poor and middle class go homeless.
And that's the seeds of communism.
That's the seed of revolt.
You know, that was the Russian Revolution, Lenin and Stalin.
It's happening all again.
And the way this was so stupid that only an intellectual from a U.S. university or a school would believe this crap.
Oh, yeah, that's a good idea.
You know, it was a good idea.
But the only way they could enforce this was by force.
So you look at what happened in China.
They had to use force to get the people to comply with this stupid man's idea, with his ideologues, ideas.
In Russia, they had to use force to get them to, you know, to comply.
So that's the Fao Long Gong and all this stuff.
They suppress people.
Because Marx wanted everybody to be equal.
Pull the rich down, pull the poor up.
And people actually believed that idea.
But his primary idea was intellectuals should tell the world how to live.
Those are called academics, the liberal left.
And to achieve that revolution, he wanted to destabilize society.
Well, you stabilize it by taking the currency.
You make the currency fake.
And that's what happened when the Federal Reserve Bank came in 1913, I think.
At the same time, the 16th Amendment was passed, which was taxes.
And America was founded as a tax-free nation, you know, 1773.
It wasn't founded in 1776.
It was founded in 1773, the Boston Tea Party.
And now everybody says, well, you have to pay your taxes.
You have to pay your taxes.
I'm a capitalist.
I pay zero taxes legally.
I fight like a dog.
I refuse to play that game because what those taxes are used for is to create wars.
You know, that's how we finance our wars.
It's tragic what's happening.
It's absolutely tragic.
And I fought in war.
I didn't like doing it.
But I realized Marx was like my poor dad, head of the labor union.
And my poor dad, what Marx says was workers of the world unite.
So I go home to my, in high school, my poor dad's head of the teachers union.
Workers of the world unite.
That sounds familiar.
Today, the NEA National Education Association, the National Extortion Association, is the most powerful labor union in America.
And they control our government because this is what talks here.
We've got to fight back.
So that's why when I heard that the epoch time, you guys were coming to interview me.
I said, what an honor because I've been in the same battle.
You've been battling.
I fight these guys here.
And that's why I wrote this book here.
And that's why my friend here, Donald Trump, and I fight together for financial education.
So what is the best financial advice right now, given our current reality for the typical young person who, you know, many of whom are wondering what their future is going to look like?
They're wondering, could I even afford a house?
Could I even, how do I get into getting assets like Robert Kiyosaki has suggested in his books, if they're familiar with Rich Dad, poor dad, where do we start with providing that advice and education?
May I give you a long answer to a short question?
Please.
In 1974, I was getting out of the Marine Corps and they passed, government passed this thing called ERISA, Employee Retirement Income Security Act.
I said, what's that mean?
Well, anti-the government says income security, you know, it's fake.
It started the 401k and the IRA.
That shift in 1974 was that workers shifted from a defined benefit pension plan, a DB pension plan, to define C, D C pension plan.
So a defined benefit was like if I work for today, I work for the Ford Mortar Company.
I'd have a defined benefit plan.
My retirement was guaranteed.
The 401k or ERISA put in place a defined contribution pension plan.
That means if there was nothing there, you have no retirement.
So my tariff, I just feel horrible, my generation of boomers, they're going to have a rug pulled out from underneath of them because when this market comes down, which it is coming down now, they have no retirement because everything is put in 401ks, ETFs, IRAs, all that crap, bonds.
You know, when my financial friends say bonds are safe.
That is the biggest lie I've ever heard.
You know, bonds aren't safe.
China and Japan are dumping U.S. bonds right now.
What about gold?
What about silver?
What about oil?
What about cattle?
What about some, what about real estate?
Do you know what I mean?
So I don't, so because I read this book here, 1965, I was 18 years old.
I said, oh, I better start thinking differently.
But my rich dad, which is why I wrote this book here, agreed wholeheartedly with this book.
He says, your poor dad, Marxist, good man.
He says, we should give people money.
We should take care of them.
Well, that's honorable.
But why not teach them?
That's why I wrote this book here.
Why not teach people the fish versus out of steel fish?
And that's what the liberal left is doing.
They're stealing our wealth here, our money.
So where does that leave the typical young person today?
Well, get financial educated.
I don't plug my own stuff.
I have a board game called cash flow.
Well, this is why I've come here to you, right?
Like we need good advice for all of us.
I mean, I need it, frankly, not just the young people.
So how do we educate ourselves?
You mentioned one thing very clearly that you want to have tangible assets that appreciate.
You can't print.
Yeah.
So the cash flow board game, the reason I created the cash flow board game, when I was 10 years old, my poor dad kept asking, hey, Dad, Dad, Dad.
What am I going to learn about money?
He says, we don't teach school about money.
Then I realized you know anything about money.
I said, well, how did I get rich?
He says, well, if you stay in school, get your PhD.
I said, Dad, you have a PhD.
We're poor.
Do you know what I mean?
Most PhDs are poor.
He says, well, then you better talk to your best friend's father.
That was Rich Dad.
And Rich Dad was a man who had never finished school.
He dropped out of school at 13.
So I went to see my rich dad and I said, would you teach me about money?
He said, get out of here.
I said, get out of here.
You're wasting my time.
I said, I'll do anything.
He says, you work for me for free.
So I had to work at Rich Dad owned hotels.
So I had to go there, pick up cigarette butts and all that.
And I worked for free.
And I'd sit down and he said, okay, I'm going to teach you about money.
And he'd break out the monopoly game.
And we played Monopoly, you know, four greenhouses, red hotel.
Guess what?
I own greenhouses and red hotels today.
I was 10 years old.
It was in my brain.
I said, that's how I get rich.
I'm not saying you have to buy real estate.
So I created the cash flow board game because the power of a game is better than a teacher.
A game includes four intelligences.
Mental, physical.
You've got to move stuff around.
Emotional and spiritual.
When you lose in a game, you go, oh, but losing is good because you want to fight back.
So there's four intelligences in the game.
Mental, emotional, EQ, physical, and spiritual.
Like you go to a golf course, can I learn how to play golf?
Yeah, but you can't use golf clubs.
That's what schools are like.
Can you imagine this?
You hit the ball 500 yards and it's a hole in one.
You've hit a hole in one every single time.
That's academics.
That's PhDs.
I sat there.
You guys live in La La Land.
And those La La Land guys are Marxists.
They're exactly as Mark said.
It's intellectual should run the world.
Let's say you're a young person today.
You've just finished, let's say, high school.
You're considering maybe the trades because they're becoming fashionable again.
You know, there's this whole big thing against trades for a while.
You're considering university and you don't have a lot of money.
Your parents are, you know, poor dad style, right?
For whatever reason, maybe just down and out.
Maybe they tried.
What's your next step?
I'll just tell you what my rich dad told me.
I'm kind of in the Marine Corps.
Like I said, I'm a pilot.
And so my friends were all joining the airlines.
And so my poor dad was so happy to go fly for your daddy, fly for American.
And then get your PhD.
I said, that's it, Dad.
He goes, yeah.
I went to my rich dad and he says, how do I get rich?
He says, be an entrepreneur.
I'm like, so how long did it take you to become a pilot?
I said, two years.
Same thing.
You need the skills of an entrepreneur.
So I said, what's that?
He said skill number one of an entrepreneur.
Right, you have to sell.
And in my family I went oh my god, because my poor dad's family, they hated salesmen, they hated salesmen.
No, I don't want to sell, please to my rich dad please, I can't sell.
My mom and dad hate salesmen, You know, they think they're crooks, they're liars, they're scam and all this.
I said, you asked me for my advice.
You have to learn how to sell.
No, no.
I'm about 27 years old.
No, I didn't think about that.
He says, Robert, how's your sex life?
I said, zero.
He says, because you can't sell.
I said, okay, I'll learn how to sell.
So then my next job was to go find a job that paid me to learn how to sell.
And so I got down to interviewing with two companies finally, IBM and Xerox.
And so the only thing I asked them about wasn't the pay.
I said, tell me about your sales school.
So today you can get that same, similar same training in network marketing.
You go to a network marketing company like Amway and stuff like this.
They have to train you to sell.
And they'll coach you.
You know, if you fail, they'll coach you.
They'll fail, they'll coach you.
So I have to learn how to sell.
And then the, so that was number one.
Second was after I was selling, rich dad says, so what's the next thing?
He says, you have to learn how to use debt.
And in my poor dad's family, you know, debt is dangerous.
Rich dad says, you just came back from Vietnam.
The U.S. dollar is debt.
Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard.
This is 1974.
So in 71, the dollar is now debt.
He says, you've got to learn how to use debt.
And as I said before, the more debt they print, the rich get richer, poor middle class get poorer.
So this gap between everybody is so wide today.
So holy man.
So I said, how do I learn how to use debt?
He says, take a class on real estate.
So I was searching around and I found one, how to make money, millions in real estate with nothing down.
You know, he's hype.
This is TV time before YouTube.
And so I signed up for this nothing down course.
It was really good.
This guy was a real real estate investor.
And for three days, he taught me how to, you know, how to use debt and all this, debt financing.
And I said, okay, I did the three.
Now what do I have to do?
This was the best advice.
He says, most guys will leave this course and do nothing.
He says, your job in the next 100 days is to look at 100 deals.
What?
He says, you got to get to real world.
So I'm now like, I come out of this course.
For the next day, I go to realtor after realtor after realtor.
I said, I want to look at some property I want to buy for nothing down.
It all threw me out.
But I kept asking, kept asking, kept asking.
How do I find a piece of real estate I can get?
I have no money.
And finally, there's one guy, I still remember him, he goes, I have the deal for you.
So I said, really?
But it took, I didn't go 100 times, but I was willing to.
Most people quit.
So this guy says, I got a deal for you.
It's on Maui.
I'm like, wow.
Maui is the richest place on, you know, the most expensive island in Hawaii.
So I flew it over to Maui and sure enough, it was a beachfront condo on the beach in Maui.
It was $18,000.
This is 1974.
So I broke out my credit card and I put the down payment on this.
It was 100% debt.
And I made $25 a month.
After all expenses, debt and all this, I was free.
But I had to find that deal.
Most people are so effing lazy.
They go to a financial planner.
What you got?
They just take what they sell.
So to this day, you can ask my assistants.
All I'm doing is looking at deals.
It's called deal flow.
Looking at this deal, this deal, this deal, this deal.
And it becomes a habit, if you know what I mean.
So you can train yourself to have the skills and the mindset of a rich person, but you have to do the work.
Well, I think that's the key here.
You're pointing out something incredibly important.
You have to do the work.
Amen.
And I've heard that from a lot of young women.
They go, you can't find men today.
You know, they're all, they want to be TikTok dancers or they play video games in the basement.
And they said, we can't find men.
So they can't afford to have kids, you know, buy apartments or rent and all this.
Let me run an idea by you.
Okay.
I have a theory that there's a few things if you teach a very young kid, right, that will really help them in life.
And it's something, here's one example.
I'm just going to use one example because this relates to the communist manifesto, right?
So my background is in biology.
I was actually an evolutionary biologist in training, right?
And one of the things we never learned, okay, I literally never learned this until my 40s, okay, is where does prosperity come from?
Okay, and I think one of the biggest lies that is in the sort of the communist approach to the world is that there's the pie is fixed.
You have a pie, it's a fixed pie, and the rich people take it from the poor people, right?
That, I mean, and you, because that's kind of how it works in nature, right?
As a biologist, you kind of learn, well, you know, there's limited resources and someone gets the resource, some doesn't get the resource.
But with human beings, the pie expands as you get prosperity, right?
And you have Adam Smith, he has, you know, division of labor is the cause, you know, there's innovation, there's all these different approaches, but I never learned this, right?
And it's, I think it's very easy to convince someone of this, of the communist approach if they don't understand that prosperity is a thing, right?
It expands the pie.
I'm curious what you think about that.
Well, that's Malthusian economics, allocation of scarce resources.
And the reality is we're given a brain, you know, this here and this here.
Use it.
Look at Elon Musk.
He's a South African, comes to America, comes the richest man in the world.
He didn't ask for a handout.
He got government grants and all this.
But you can create your prosperity by creating.
So I wrote this book here.
It was turned down by every publisher because I said, you don't know what you're talking about.
So I published it anyway.
It sold 48 million copies so far.
Number one book in finance today.
Now, 48 million, you know, I make a buck a book, so it's a few bucks there.
This didn't exist till I wrote it.
It came out of here.
I mean, it's a true story.
The same as Donald Trump.
You know, he was born a rich man.
I wasn't, but we're good friends because we think we think alike.
So, you know, you see the picture that Trump's putting a ballroom onto the White House.
It's the picture of the cartoon.
There's a White House with a Trump Tower attached to it.
You know, you give him, if you let him do it, he'd probably do it.
It comes out of your hand.
You create it.
You create your prosperity.
For someone that does have some wealth, you know, however it's distributed right now, you know, it could be anywhere from all of it's in cash and fiat, as you described it, all the way to, you know, something like it's all in gold right now.
What do you reckon?
What would you recommend people should do in this current financial reality in terms of their allocation of that wealth?
Well, my rich dad said that was interesting.
He said, there's a million ways to financial heaven.
In other words, find a way that works for you.
There's a billion ways to financial hell.
And most people go into financial hell.
So rather than being told what to do, like go to a financial planner or get a job and all this stuff, I had to find out what I was interested in.
And I like real estate.
I really do love real estate.
I own probably 1,500 rental properties.
I own commercials.
I love real estate.
Life is what you imagine.
Imagine a nation.
So there's a billion ways of financial heaven.
I love real estate.
I don't like stocks.
I don't like bonds.
I don't like paper.
I like in see, touch, and feel.
Like I like, I love cars.
You know, I own, I love pens.
I have watches.
I'm a C, touch, and feel guy.
So I stay with what I like and what I'm interested in.
I just love real estate and it provides a service.
You know, people have a place to sleep.
Unfortunately, you know, people are going homeless.
You know, Thomas Jefferson warned us, America, about this.
He said, if a central bank takes over, people wind up homeless in the lands their fathers built.
And today, Jefferson's prophecy is coming true.
Homelessness is exploding because every time you print money, two things go up, taxes and inflation.
I love this idea, right?
You have to find the thing you love because that's the thing that you can put all your heart into.
Well, what you love is legal, ethical, and moral.
Well, hopefully what you love is all those things.
Well, so this has been a fascinating conversation for me.
Perhaps a final thought as we finish?
Well, what I love is this is a piece of real estate.
If I own this, I'd take care of it.
If you don't love it, you don't take care of it.
So I don't like stocks.
I don't own any IBM or Xerox or General Motors or Apple.
I like real estate.
I like oil.
I like cattle.
I like food.
So that's what I invest in.
I just really love real estate and I love debt.
Was a guy like Dave Ramsey.
He's always saying, live debt free.
Well, Dave's a friend of mine, but and most people should follow Dave's advice because they don't think about money.
So if you're going to be like me, you have to learn how to use debt.
And that's where real estate courses come in.
They teach you debt to equity ratios and all this stuff.
You can have too much debt or not enough debt and all this stuff.
So a lot of times I'll take a property.
I'll improve its value.
I'll borrow out the equity, add more debt to it.
And it drives people crazy.
They go, it's 100% debt.
I said, yes, but it cash flows.
So the asset is, you know, because now debt holds its place.
That cash I borrow, the equity I borrow out, I buy another piece.
And that's my fault.
There's a million ways to heaven and a billion ways to hell.
Find a way that you like.
And you have to love doing that, I think.
If you are going through the debt, if you're going to go the debt route, it's kind of a bit dangerous if you don't love it.
And smart.
You have to want to study it.
You know what I mean?
Because I've lost a lot of money in my time.
I've made a lot of mistakes.
But I'm still playing Monopoly.
I'm still a 10-year-old boy going.
And if you ever go to Hawaii, you know, Rich Dad started.
He goes, I asked Rich Dad, he had no money either.
And he said, someday I'll own that hotel.
You go to Waikiki Beach today.
That's the Hyatt Regency.
Rich Dad doesn't own the hotel.
He owns the land.
You understand?
He knew his game.
So it's just a game.
If you like stocks, it's a game.
That's all it is.
It's fun.
Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.
But every time you lose, you get smarter.
Well, Robert Kiyosaki, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you very much.
Really an honor.
I just, I have tremendous respect for what you guys are doing.
We're the same battle.
We're fighting communism.
I fight my financial education.
Well, thank you so very much.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining Robert Kiyosaki and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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